1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a liquid discharge apparatus, for example, an ink jet printer.
2. Related Art
A known example of printing apparatuses (liquid discharge apparatuses) is an ink jet printer in which a droplet discharge head (liquid discharge head) is provided on a carriage (mobile body) that is freely movable in the scanning directions so that droplets (liquid) are discharged from the droplet discharge head to a recording medium supported on a platen (support portion). In this type of printer, it sometimes happens that a part of the recording medium bends (cockles) when droplets are discharged to the recording medium from the droplet discharge head or when the recording medium is transported on the platen in a transport direction that intersects with the scanning directions. Therefore, JP-A-2014-83707 discloses a printing apparatus in which a bend smoothing-out member that eliminates bend formed in a recording medium is provided on the carriage.
In the printing apparatus described in JP-A-2014-83707, when a recording medium has a bend, a pressing portion having a slant surface which is formed on an end portion of the bend smoothing-out member contacts a bent portion of the recording medium as the carriage moves in a scanning direction and presses the portion of contact toward the platen to remove the bend from the recording medium. In this situation, the slant-surfaced pressing portion, besides pressing the recording medium toward the platen, sometimes guides air into a gap between the bend smoothing-out portion and the platen. If such guided air is further guided to flow into a gap between the droplet discharge head and the platen, there is a risk of adversely affecting the landing accuracy of droplets that the droplet discharge head discharges to the recording medium.
Therefore, in order to discharge from the gap between the platen and the droplet discharge head the air guided into the gap by the pressing portion, the bend smoothing-out portion of the printing apparatus described in JP-A-2014-83707 is provided with a through hole that extends through the bend smoothing-out portion in an up-down direction and a guide groove that guides air from a pressing portion-side opening to a gap-side opening of the through hole.
However, the guide groove and the through hole described above are provided so as to discharge from the gap between the droplet discharge head and the platen by the slant-surfaced pressing portion only a portion of the air guided into the gap, and do not solve, in the least, the problem of the pressing portion guiding air toward the gap between the droplet discharge head and the platen.